From Encountering
Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, Stephen T. Davis, ed. Atlanta, John
Knox Press, 1981. A revised edition was published in 2001. Professor Griffin
has published two books on the problem of evil: God, Power, and Evil: A
Process Theodicy,
Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976; reprinted with a new preface, Lanham,
Md.: University Press of America, 1991; and Evil Revisited: Responses
and Reconsiderations, Albany: State University of New York Press,
1991.

Creation
Out of Chaos

and the
Problem of Evil

David Ray Griffin

“In the beginning, God created the
heavens and the earth.” This is how Genesis 1:1 has traditionally been
translated. Even the Revised Standard Version so renders it. However, the
RSV in a footnote gives an alternative reading: “When God began to create
the heavens and the earth, the earth was without form and void. . . .” I
understand that most Hebrew scholars believe this to be the more accurate
translation. For many years I did not give much though to the possible
implications of the alternative reading. Recently I have come to see that
the alternative reading suggests a radically different view of the
god-world relation from that which has dominated traditional theology and
has thereby had a decisive influence upon Jewish and Christian
sensibilities. If accepted, this radically different view will influence
every aspect of Christian thought; but its most obvious and central impact
will be upon that problem which has increasingly been perceived as the
Achilles’ heel of traditional theology, the problem of evil. (This
metaphor is overly generous to traditional theology: Achilles had only
one vulnerable spot.)

The central issue between the two
readings is whether creation was ex nihilo, i.e., whether God
created the world out of absolutely nothing.[1]The traditional reading of Genesis 1:1 does not
say that it as, but it suggests it more readily than does the
alternative reading. And it has been used by traditional theologians to
support the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.

The alternative reading, while also not
spelling out things with the precision desired by philosophical
theologians, suggests that God’s creation of our world did not involve the
absolute beginning of finite existence but rather the achievement of order
out of a pre-existing chaos. This interpretation of creation, which is
reflected in many passages in the Old Testament, would make the Hebrew
view structurally similar to that reflected in man other Near Eastern
creation myths, and to that of Plato’s Timaeus. In the Timaeus
the “Demiurge” is a craftsman working with materials that are not
completely malleable to his will. They confront him with elements of
“necessity,” and he works to create out of the chaos a world that is as
good “as possible.” The world achieved represents a victory of
“persuasion” over necessity.

Traditional theologians have contrasted
the “Christian” or “biblical” understanding of creation with this Platonic
view. Creation really worthy of the name, they have said, is not the mere
remolding of pre-existing materials, but is making things out of nothing.
Most importantly, the Platonic view held that these pre-existing materials
put limits on what God could do; since they were not created by him out of
nothing, they were not totally subject to his will. This runs counter to
clear biblical statements of divine omnipotence (e.g., Gen. 18:14: “Is
anything too hard for the Lord?”; Matt. 19:26: “With God all things are
possible”). And it is destructive of the hope that God will totally
defeat the powers of evil and make all things new. Accordingly, the
traditional Christian view of creatio ex nihilo was formed indirect
opposition to the idea of creation out of chaos.

It is interesting to note that a doctrine
so central to traditional theology has so little direct biblical support.
The only clear statement in II Maccabees (7:28), a book that Protestants
and Jews do no include in their Bibles. The majority of passages I the
Old Testament that speak to the issue one way or the other support the
idea that creation involved bringing order out of pre-existing materials.
Many contemporary theologians who think the notion of creatio ex nihilo
is important agree that they have the weight of the biblical evidence
against them, but argue that this is not decisive: the crucial question
is, which view is more compatible with the essence of the Christian
faith? Some would add: and which view is, all things considered, most
reasonable? These indeed are the grounds upon which the debate should
rest, especially since the biblical evidence is so ambiguous. Of course,
having argued that the number of explicit biblical passages is not
decisive in regard to creatio ex nihilo, upholders of traditional
theology should in fairness grant this in regard to the related issue of
divine omnipotence, where they have the majority of explicit passages on
their side.

The point to be stressed here is that the
contrast between the two views is not a contrast between one view that is
“biblical” and based on “revelation” and another that is a “departure from
the biblical view” based on “dubious speculation.” The biblical support
is ambiguous. And both views are speculative hypotheses. The only
question is which hypothesis has more to commend it.

Statement of
the Problem of Evil

In order to compare different solutions
to the problem of evil, we need to have a clear statement of what the
problem is. The apparently simply statement found in most textbooks are
riddled with ambiguities. The usual 4-step statement is:

1.If
God is all-powerful, God could prevent all evil.

2.If
God is all-good, God would want to prevent all evil.

3.Evil exists.

4.Therefore
God is either not all-powerful or all-good (or both).

The central ambiguity is that none of the
premises indicate whether the evil to which they refer is genuine
evil or merely apparent evil. This ambiguity has allowed many
theologians to have false sense of confidence that the problem is quite
easily solved. They reject premise 2 on the grounds that a good God would
not want to prevent all evil, since much evil turns out to contribute to a
higher good. But, rather than being a rejection or premise 2, this move
is really a rejection of premise 3, as these theologians are saying in
effect that there is no genuine evil––all the evil is merely
apparent evil since it contributes to a greater good.

For these and other reasons, I find the
following 7-step statement to be most helpful in eliminating ambiguities,
thereby allowing one to see just which premise is being rejected by the
various theodicies.[2]

1.To be God, a being must be omnipotent (with an “omnipotent being”
defined as one whose power to bring about what it wills is essentially
unlimited––except [perhaps] by logical impossibilities).

2.An omnipotent being could unilaterally bring about a world devoid
of genuine evil (with “genuine evil” defined as anything that makes the
world worse than it could have otherwise been).

3.To be God, a being must be morally perfect.

4.A morally perfect being would want to bring about a world devoid of
genuine evil.

5.If there is a God, there would be no genuine evil.

6.But there is genuine evil in the world.

7.Therefore there is no God.

I will comment upon some of the six
premises, pointing out the ambiguities some of the terms are designed to
eliminate.

In premise 1, the key term is
“essentially.” Some theologians believe in a divine self-limitation, in
which God voluntarily gave up power. This would not be
essential limitation. God’s power is essentially limited only if this
limitation is “in the nature of things,” not being a product of God’s
will. This limitation could be due to another actuality or actualities
having its or their own inherent power, or to some impediment to God’s
will in God’s own nature (a “dark side” to God not totally controllable by
the divine will), or to the possibilities open to God (perhaps the realm
of “possible worlds” contain none that is devoid of evil). Regarding the
last phrase of the premise: most theologians who have affirmed divine
omnipotence have held that God cannot do that which is logically
impossible, but they have not considered this to be a real limitation on
God’s power.

In premise 2 one of the key terms is
“unilaterally.” If that term is not inserted, the statement could mean:
God could bring about a world devoid of genuine evil, if God is
lucky, i.e., if the creatures decide to co-operate. But if that were all
that were meant, premise 5 would not follow from premises 1-4, and the
whole argument would be invalid. It is only if God could unilaterally
bring about such a world that God can be blamed for not doing so. We
do not blame parents for not raising perfect children, even though it is
logically possible for them to do so, since we recognize that there are
all sorts of limitations upon their influence––the main one being the
power of self-determination possessed by the children by which they can
resist their parents’ wills.

I have already pointed out the importance
of inserting the word “genuine” before “evil.” With this insertion, we
can be spared those lengthy explanations as to why a good God would
allow evil for the sake of a higher good, since the statement already says
that the only kind of evil in question is genuine evil, precisely
the kind which does not make the world better place, all things
considered. Hence this insertion forces those who might otherwise attack
premise 4 to openly reject premise 6––a move that is possible but
which makes most sensitive people uncomfortable, especially in this
post-Holocaust world.

Creation and Divine
Power

I now turn to the solution I favor, to
which the rejection of creatio ex nihilo is fundamental. In fact,
the problem of evil is uniquely a problem for those theistic positions
that hold the doctrine of omnipotence implied by the doctrine of creation
out of nothing. For, the problem of evil can be stated as a syllogism
entailing the non-existence of deity only if deity is defined as
omnipotent in the sense of having no essential limitations upon the
exercise of its will. And it is precisely omnipotence in this sense that
the speculative hypothesis of creatio ex nihilo is designed to
support.

Two issues are involved. First, if God
in creating our world necessarily worked with some pre-existent
actualities, these actualities might well have some power of their own
with which they could partially thwart the divine will. Second, there
might be some eternal, uncreated, necessary principles (beyond purely
logical truths) about the way these actualities can be ordered which limit
the sorts of situations that are really possible. But if God created this
world out of absolutely nothing, then the beings of this world are
absolutely dependent upon God. Any power they have is not at all
inherent, but is totally a gift of God, and as such can be overridden (or,
which amounts to the same thing, withdrawn) at any time. And if there has
not always been a multiplicity of finite actualities, it does not make
sense to think of any uncreated and hence necessary principles as to how
the actualities of the world can be ordered. Any such principles would be
purely contingent ones, created along with the actualities whose behavior
they describe, and hence alterable at (divine) will.

My solution dissolves the problem of evil
by denying the doctrine of omnipotence fundamental to it. Of the various
ways of denying deity’s essentially unlimited power to effect its will,
mine is to hypothesize that there has always been a plurality of
actualities having some power of their own. This power is two-fold: the
power to determine themselves (partially), and the power to influence
others.

Traditional theism has always held that
energy or power is eternal. But it hypothesized that this power all
essentially belonged to God alone, and was at some point all embodied in
God. I share the view of those who hold instead that power has always
existed in non-divine actualities as well as in the divine actuality. No
special philosophical problems are raised by this view: if it is
intelligible to hold that the existence of God requires no explanation,
since something must exist necessarily and “of itself,” then it is
not unintelligible to hold that that which exists necessarily is God
and a realm of non-divine actualities. Nor is this a denial that our
world is contingent and created by God. My view is that the beings making
up our world, including the most primitive ones (such as quarks and
electrons) are contingent, having been brought about and sustained through
the creative providential activity of God. All that is necessary to the
hypothesis is that power has always been and necessarily is shared
power, that God has never had and could never have a monopoly on power,
and that the power possessed by the non-divine actualities is inherent to
them and hence cannot be cancelled out or overridden by God.

This last point is the most essential
one. Some theologians might agree that we have power, even power in
relation to God, and yet say that God could overpower us and hence totally
determine our activities, including our willing and desiring. But that is
excluded by what I mean by saying that we have inherent power in relation
to God. The claim is precisely that our self-determining activity, and
the consequent influence we have on others, cannot be totally
controlled by God. Hence God cannot control but can only persuade what we
become and how we affect others.

My position is that this inherent power
did not arise at some point in the past, such as with the creation of
human beings. All creatures have at least some iota of this two-fold
power. And there have, by hypothesis, always been such creatures that
have had some power of their own by which they could resist the divine
creating activity.

Our present view that the creation of our
world occurred through a long evolutionary process jives with the notion
of creation out of chaos and its correlative assumption that divine
creative power is necessarily persuasive. The outdated view that all the
present species were created instantaneously in their present forms jived
with the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo and its correlative idea of
divine omnipotence. Contemporary theologians who accept the evolutionary
hypothesis and yet hold to the hypothesis of divine omnipotence have a lot
of explaining to do. Most centrally they must explain why a God whose
power is essentially unlimited would use such a long, pain-filled method,
with all its blind-alleys, to create a world. The need for explanation is
further aggravated when they hold that human beings are the only creatures
that are really important to God, and that the rest of the creation exists
only for the sake of the divine-human drama. If that is so, why did God
take so long getting to the main act? Of course, theologians can claim
that they need not answer these questions. But the hypothesis of divine
omnipotence must, like any hypothesis, commend itself by its explanatory
power. Each unanswered question reveals deficiencies in that power.

Necessary
Correlations between

Power and
Value

The fact that our world arose through an
evolutionary process has further theological relevance beyond the support
it gives for the idea that God’s power is necessarily persuasive. It also
gives support to the idea that there are certain necessary principle
correlating power and value. These correlations form the
second major part of my theodicy (the first being that all individuals
have inherent power so that God’s power is necessarily persuasive). My
thesis here is that there is a positive correlation among the following
four variables, so that as one rises in degree the others necessarily rise
proportionately:

1.The
capacity to enjoy intrinsic goodness (or value).

2.The
capacity to suffer intrinsic evil (or dis-value).

3.The power of self-determination.

4.The
power to influence others (for good or ill).

By “intrinsic value” I mean the value
that something has for itself, apart from any value it may have for
others. Intrinsic value can be possessed only by individuals that
experience, although this experience need not be self-reflexive or even
conscious. According to the non-dualistic position which I accept but
cannot defend here, there are no non-experiencing individuals which are
mere objects. All individuals experience, which means that all individuals
have some capacity, however minimal, to enjoy and to suffer, i.e. to
experience intrinsic goodness and intrinsic evil.

This does not entail the extreme and
totally unwarranted hypothesis that everything experiences.
Aggregates of individuals do not experience (e.g., when there is a
crowd of people, the crowd itself has no experience over and above the
experiences of the individual people). Rocks, chairs, planets,
typewriters, automobiles and probably plants are aggregates which as such
have no experience; the only experiences contained in them are those of
the individuals making them up. Examples of genuine individuals
would be electrons, atoms, molecules, cells, and animal (including human)
souls or psyches.

This means that there is a hierarchy of
individuals: less complex ones are compounded into more complex ones. For
example, electrons and other subatomic individuals are contained in an
atom; atoms are contained in molecules; molecules in cells; and cells in
living animals dominated by a central experience called the soul. (The
major difference between plants and animals is that the former do not seem
to have one member that dominates over and coordinates the rest.)

The direction of the evolutionary process
toward increasing complexity raises the question as to whether this
directionality is explainable as a reflection of the creative purpose of
God. This would be the case if complexity could be correlated with
something that a loving God would be interested in promoting. And this is
precisely what we find: increased complexity of the organism seems to be
the condition for increased richness of experience, hence of increased
intrinsic goodness. Whatever experience is possessed by electrons, atoms
and molecules must be extremely slight; hence any intrinsic good they can
enjoy must be extremely slight (so we are justified in not considering
their “rights” in our ethical deliberations). But when we come to living
cells, we are probably at the stage where significant degrees of enjoyment
can first be experienced. With animal souls, especially those supported
by a central nervous system, we have another quantum jump in the capacity
to experience value. Finally, the human soul is capable of enjoying all
sorts of values not open to the souls of the lower animals.

However, every increase in complexity in
this hierarchy is Janus-faced: each increase in the capacity to enjoy
intrinsic goodness is likewise an increase in the capacity to suffer. It
probably does not make sense to speak of the capacity for pain below the
level of the cell. And––to jump to the top––the human being is susceptible
to all sorts of sufferings to which the lower animals are virtually
oblivious.

My thesis is that this correlation
between the capacity to enjoy and the capacity to suffer is a necessary,
metaphysical correlation, inherent in the nature of things. This
thesis provides an answer to one of the central questions involved in the
problem of evil, namely, “Why did God create us so that we are so
susceptible to physical pain and psychological suffering?” The answer,
according to this thesis, is that God could do no other. That is, not
without foregoing beings capable of the kinds of values we can
experience. To have the good is necessarily to risk the chance of the
bad.

Of course, there is nothing certain about
this thesis. It is a speculative hypothesis. But––and this is often
overlooked––the denial of the thesis is equally speculative.
No one knows for certain that such a positive correlation does not
necessarily exist. In fact, to deny that the correlation is necessary,
i.e., that it would have to obtain in any world, is even more
speculative. For, we know form our experience of this world that
worlds in which the correlation obtains are really possible. But we have
no experiential basis for knowing that a world in which the correlation
would not obtain is even possible. (And hopefully no one will maintain
that this philosophical knowledge has been vouchsafed us by revelation.)

My hypothesis is that the other variables
rise proportionately with the first two, and with equal necessity.
Individuals with greater capacity for the enjoyment of values necessarily
have more power of self-determination, i.e., more freedom. One of the
other questions most often asked is, “Why didn’t God create rational
saints?”––by which is meant, “Why didn’t God create beings who would be
like us in every respect (having the capacity for rationality and all the
values this allows), except that they would never sin?” The answer
provided by my theodicy is, “Because God couldn’t.” That is, God couldn’t
do it unilaterally––recall the insertion of this word into the
formal statement of the problem. The idea of a being capable of rational
thought who would always use this capacity to make the right decision is
not a logically contradictory idea. Hence there is nothing contradictory
in the idea that God could produce such a being. What is
contradictory––given the hypothesis that all individuals have some power
of self-determination––is that God could unilaterally produce such
a being.

However, someone might well grant that
answer and still press the question, refining it to this form: “Granted
that God cannot completely control any individuals, since they all have
some power of self-determination by which they can resist the divine
persuasion, why did God give some human beings such an inordinate
degree of this power. Electrons, atoms, and molecules have, according to
the hypothesis, some degree of self-determinacy, and yet they seem to do
pretty much what they are supposed to. Why aren’t human beings kept on a
shorter leash?” It is to this refined form of the question that the
correlation between the first and third variables supplies an answer. To
have creatures who can enjoy much more intrinsic good than can electrons,
atoms, and molecules is necessarily to have creatures with much more power
of self-determination with which to deviate from the divine will. Greater
freedom is a necessary corollary of the possibility of higher value
experiences.

The correlation between this third
variable and the second one (the capacity to suffer) helps illumine the
reason for the extent and depth of human suffering. It is precisely we
creatures who have by far the greatest capacity for suffering who likewise
have by far the greatest power to deviate from God’s will for our lives.
Combining these two factors gives us an extraordinary capacity to make
ourselves miserable. God did not, according to my hypothesis, make us
this way because of some mysterious reason totally beyond our ken, nor
because of a desire to “toughen us up,” nor because of some sadistic
strain in the divine nature. God did it because there was no
choice––except the choice of calling off the evolutionary advance before
beings of our complexity had emerged.

The fourth variable explains the need for
an evolutionary process in order to attain the kind of world we now have.
This fourth variable says that those individuals with more intrinsic value
(for themselves) also have more instrumental value (to contribute to
others). For example, electrons and protons do not have as much intrinsic
value as molecules. Accordingly they do not have sufficient data to
contribute to support a living cell; the cell cold not emerge prior to the
requisite atoms and molecules. Likewise an animal soul could not be
supported by the data that can be derived from a large aggregate of atoms;
a large aggregate of cells was required before the animal soul could
emerge.

From the perspective of my theological
position, the fact that our world was evidently formed through a long,
step-by-step process constitutes no refutation, even partially, of the
hypothesis of divine creation. Nor does it present theology with a
probable fact that can only be handled by some ad hoc hypothesis.
Rather, it suggests a way of understanding God’s creative activity that
does not present theology with an insuperable problem of evil. And it
fits in perfectly with a set of principles that commend themselves on
other grounds.

The fourth variable also illuminates even
further the reason this world is such a dangerous place, especially since
human beings have arrived in it. Those beings with the greatest power of
self-determination, and hence the greatest power to deviate from the
divine will for the good of the whole, necessarily have the greatest power
to influence others––for good or ill. The capacity to create and the
capacity to destroy go hand in hand.

Again, this feature of our world was not
ordained by God for some reason that God only knows. Rather, by
hypothesis this is a feature that would necessarily obtain in any
world; the principles correlating value and power are uncreated.
(Incidentally, they need not be conceived as metaphysical principles
external to God. Rather, they can be thought of as belonging to the
divine essence. Like divine omniscience and love, they can be considered
principles that are neither the product of the divine will, nor contrary
to it.)

The Goodness
of God

What then is the upshot of my theodicy,
my attempt to “justify the ways of God”? It is not to maintain that god
is not responsible for any of the evil in the world. For, in a very real
sense, God is responsible for all of those things that we normally
think of when we refer to the problem of evil. For, if God had not
persuaded the world to bring forth living cells and then animal life,
there would be no significant suffering in the world. If God had not
continued to draw the creation upward until creatures with the capacity
for rational thought were evoked, there would be no moral evil, or sin,
i.e., deliberate disobedience to the divine will; nor would the most awful
forms of suffering exist––there would be no Holocausts.

The question then is, “Can God be thus
responsible without being indictable, i.e., blameworthy?” I would say
“Yes.” In the first place, although god is ultimately responsible for the
world’s having reached a state in which significant evils can occur, God
is never totally responsible for the evils that do occur. Each situation
contains seeds for good and evil. God (by hypothesis) seeks to lure the
creatures to realize the greatest good that is possible in that particular
situation. When the creatures actualize a lesser possibility, this
failure is due to their exercise of power, not God’s.

In the second place the aim of a “morally
good being” is more accurately stated positively than negatively. That
is, the aim is first of all to produce good, not to avoid suffering. If
the moral aim could be adequately expressed as the intention to avoid
suffering, then moral adults would never have children––that would be the
way to guarantee that they would never have children who would suffer or
cause suffering. Analogously, a perfectly moral God would simply avoid
bringing forth a world with any creatures capable of any significant
degree of suffering. But––by hypothesis––this would mean that there would
be no world with any significant value in it. Surely that cannot
be our idea of what a perfectly moral being would do! The aim must be to
create the conditions that allow for the great good while minimizing the
evils.

In other words, suffering and sinful
intentions resulting in suffering are not the only forms of evil. Any
absence of good that could have been realized is evil even if no suffering
is involved. Recall that the definition of genuine evil offered earlier
was “anything which makes the world worse than it could have otherwise
been.” Any absence of good that makes the world worse than it could have
been, all things considered, is an evil. Hence, for God to have failed to
bring forth beings capable of experiencing significant value when this was
possible would have made God indictable.

Unless, of course, the evils that were
thereby made possible are so great that the goods that could be achieved
are not worth the risk. That is a question that each of us can answer
only for ourselves. Those of us who are among the most fortunate people
who have ever lived on the face of the earth must of course be aware of
our biased perspectives, and must be sensitive to the response that may
come from the less fortunate. But, even when trying to take into account
my biased perspective, I cannot imagine that I would ever conclude that
the evils of life have been so great that it would have been better had
life never emerged, or that the evils of human life, as horrendous as they
have been (and quite possibly the worse is still to come!), are such that
it would have been better had human life never been created.

There is one other theological conviction
that reinforces my judgment on this matter. This is the conviction that
God shares all our sufferings (analogously to the way that I share the
pains of my bodily members). Accordingly, while every advance in the
creative process has been a risk, since greater sufferings were thereby
made possible as well as greater goods, this has never been a risk which
God has urged us creatures to run alone. It has always been a risk for
God too. In fact God is the only being who has experienced every
single evil that has occurred in the creation. This means that God is the
one being in position to judge whether the goods achievable have been
worth the price.

Natural Evil

Thus far, insofar as I have discussed the
cause of evil, I have focused attention primarily on moral
evil, as I have sought to explain why human beings can cause so much
evil But the theological position being outlined here is equally capable
of explaining so–called “natural evil,” that which is caused by non-moral
agents. And it is this form of evil that most theodicies find most
problematical. For, they employ what I call a “hybrid free-will defense”
to account for the evil caused by human beings. I call it a hybrid
free-will defense because it does not say that freedom is inherent in the
world as such, but instead says that God voluntarily bestows freedom upon
the creation––and usually only to a select portion of creation, i.e., to
human beings alone, or to them and other rational creatures (angels).

Accordingly, this hybrid free-will
defense has a difficult time with evil is apparently caused by sub-human
nature, since the beings constituting this realm by hypothesis have no
power with which to deviate from God’s will. One way out is to say with
Augustine that no genuine evil ever results from sub-human causes. But in
the face of the enormous and non-rationalizable distribution of sufferings
caused by tornadoes, earthquakes, droughts, germs, and cancer cells, this
is a difficult assertion to make. Another way out is to affirm that all
such evils are caused by a fallen angel (Satan). This is, of course, not
readily falsifiable, but it does strain credulity (for me, at least, much
more than the hypothesis that all creatures have some power of their
own). Also it raises the question as to why God allows Satan to do things
that make the universe worse than it cold have been; hence it calls God’s
goodness or wisdom into question.[3]

According to my theodicy, all creatures
great and small have some power with which to deviate from the divine will
for them. This means that there never has been a time at which we could
say that the creation was necessarily “perfect” in the sense of having
actualized the best possibilities that were open to it. Granted, very
low-grade actualities cannot be thought to deviate very much from
the divine aims for them. But over a period of billions of years very
slight deviations occurring in each moment can add up to a state of the
world that is very far removed from the state that would have results had
the divine aims been actualized all the way along. Accordingly, if God
has always worked with materials that were not necessarily in a perfect
state, and which have some inherent power to deviate from God’s aims and
to influence their successors forevermore, there is no reason to infer
that cancer, polio, tornadoes, and earthquakes exist because God wanted
our world to have them.

Why Does God
Not

“Prevent” Some
Evils?

I will conclude with a discussion
intended to drive home more clearly why God (according to my hypothesis)
simply cannot prevent the major types of evils that usually lead people to
question God’s goodness or even reality. These questions can be phrased
in the form: “Why didn’t God prevent such and such?” For example, why
didn’t God prevent that bullet from striking my son? Why didn’t God
prevent that mine shaft from caving in? Why did God allow all the pain
that occurred in the evolutionary process? Why didn’t God prevent Hitler
from murdering six million Jews?

The answer to questions of this type will
be more evident to us if we think in terms of the way God can affect the
following three types of entities: (1) low-grade enduring individuals; (2)
high-grade enduring individuals; (3) aggregates of individuals. (For the
sake of simplicity I have left out the whole spectrum of medium-grade
individuals, from the lowest animals through the non-human primates.)
These three types of entities differ from each other in having (1) very
little power of self-determination, (2) very great power of
self-determination, and (3) no power of self-determination, respectively.

(1) God acts in the world, by hypothesis,
by seeking to persuade individuals to actualize the best possibilities
that are real possibilities for them. (E.g., it is not a real
possibility for a chipmunk to write a symphony.) Low-grade enduring
individuals, such as electrons, atoms, molecules, having very little power
of self-determination, and not having many real possibilities open to
them, cannot change their behavior very quickly. Individuals at this
level are largely the products of their inheritance and their
environment. They essentially repeat the same patterns of behavior,
century after century. Even as we move into the medium-grade level, with
living cells, the capacity for novel self-determining behavior is very
limited, compared with that of human beings.

The theological significance of this
discussion is this: on the one hand, these low-grade individuals cannot
deviate very much from the divine aims for them. On the other hand, the
divine aims for them, since they can only be for possibilities that are
real possibilities for these low-grade creatures, cannot be aims for
very radical changes in behavior. Insofar as God can move these
individuals to change their ways, it must be over a very long period of
time. (This is why evolutionary change occurred so gradually until
relatively recently on earth.)

Accordingly, if the behavior of one or
more of these individuals is causing destruction in its environment, God
cannot do much quickly to change things. For example, if you have been
exposed to radio-active materials, God cannot divert the alpha, beta, and
gamma particles out of your body before they have done irreversible
damage. If cancerous cells have developed in your body, God cannot lure
them to leave voluntarily.

(2) By “high-grade enduring individuals”
I am referring here exclusively to human beings. These individuals have
much power of self-determination, and have many more real possibilities
open to them than do the lower creatures. Hence, very rapid changes of
behavior can occur with them. What is God’s power to affect them? On the
one hand, God can present quite novel aims to them, one after another.
And God can seek to persuade them to change their behavior quite
rapidly––for example to stop one’s journey to help the victim of a crime.
But on the other hand, these creatures have tremendous power with which to
deviate from the divine aims for them, and they can deviate much more
widely than can lower individuals. In a relatively short time after they
learned to write, these individuals could discover that E=mc2;
and they can use this knowledge to destroy the world even more quickly.

Thus far I have been speaking of
individuals. Most of these are compound individuals in which a
number of individuals are ordered hierarchically, with one dominant member
giving a unity of experience and activity to the whole society. The atom,
the molecule, and the cell all have a unity of activity due to this
hierarchical organization. Likewise the animal, by virtue of the
dominating influence of its soul, has a unity of response to its
environment.

(3) But some of the entities of this
world seem to have no such unity. They are mere aggregates.
Non-living things such as rocks, bodies of water, planets, automobiles,
and timbers are obvious examples. Plants also probably have no dominant
member, no soul. In any case, those things which are aggregates cannot,
as aggregates, be directly affects by God. Since God acts by
seeking to persuade individuals, and there is by definition dominating the
other members of an aggregate, God cannot directly get an aggregate to do
anything. God can move a living human body by persuading the soul to
move; if the soul decides to cross the street, the rest of the body has
little choice but to go along (assuming a healthy body). But there is no
corresponding means by which God can directly move a rock––or get it to
stop moving down the ban towards the highway. There is no way for God to
stop that bullet speeding toward the heart of a man “too young to die.”
There is no way for God to stop the overburdened timber in a mine shaft
from caving in. There is no way God can stop the automobile with a
sleeping driver from crashing into the oncoming cars. There is no way God
can prevent that aggregate of molecules called a hurricane from
devastating the towns in its paths.

In the earlier part of the paper I
stressed what God has been doing in the world, by way of creating the
conditions for good. With more space, I would describe some of the ways
in which God seeks to overcome evil in the world. But I thought it best in
these last few pages to stress the limitations on God’s prevention of
evil, since God’s “failure” to prevent evil is usually the chief source of
complaint, by theists and non-theists alike. This brief analysis of these
limitations leads to the following three-fold conclusion:

1.Those
things which cannot deviate much from the divine will also cannot be
influenced by God very quickly.

2.Those
things which can be influence by God quickly can deviate drastically from
the divine will.

3.Those
things which can do nothing on their own cannot be directly influenced by
God at all.

I could not, of course, in the brief
space of this essay hope to justify the wide-ranging hypothesis outlined
here. But I do hope that readers find the hypothesis potentially helpful
enough to consider it worthy of further exploration. It (including
variations on it) is the only hypothesis I have found that makes faith
possible in the face of the horrendous evils that occur in our world.

Faith, Reason,
and Theodicy

The foregoing completes the sketch of my
substantive theodicy. However, a theodicy is only one part of a complete
theology. The differences between theodicies are closely correlated with
different understandings of the total theological task. In this final
section I will briefly summarize my understanding of this task, especially
the relationship between “faith” (in “revelation”) and “reason,” and how
this understanding is related to the theodicy sketched above.

The central theme running through the
following points is that I reject all views according to which faith is
somehow opposed to reason.

(1) I reject the view that we are called
to believe any ideas, allegedly based on “revelation,” that are
self-contradictory. For example, some theologians admit it is
contradictory to maintain both that (A) God determines all events and that
(B) human beings are partly free and hence responsible for their actions;
yet these theologians claim that “faith” demands that we affirm both of
these ideas. I reject the view that “faith” forces us to reject “reason”
in the sense of logical consistency.

(2) Some theologians hold that logical
consistency is the only requirement of “reason” to which our beliefs must
conform. According to this view, reason’s task of determining the most
probable view of the world need not influence our religious beliefs.
Hence the believer is said to be “rationally justified” in maintaining
some theological belief that seems very improbable so long as no
logical impossibility (inconsistency) is involved. Theologians, to
defend the rationality of some doctrine, need only present some
hypothesis, however improbable, that shows the doctrine might be
true. I reject this view. The theological task as I see it is to present
a view of reality that seems more probable than other available views.

(3) Implicit in the previous two points
is the view that the Christian “revelation” does not provide us with a set
of clearly formulated statements which can then be compared with another
set of statements produced by “reason.” All Christian doctrines are human
attempts to formulate the significance of experiences taken to be
revelatory. For example, it was never shouted down from heaven, or even
whispered, that God is triune, or that the world was created out of
nothing, or that God is omnipotent, or that God is perfect love. Each of
these doctrines arose in the past as fallible human beings, guided but not
controlled by the divine spirit, tried to express their understanding of
God in the most adequate way possible, given their contexts, including
their questions, their knowledge of the world, and the conceptual tools
available to them.

Our theological task today is not to
try to hold on to their formulations at any price, but to re-think the
implications of the Christian revelatory events in the light of our
contexts––our questions, our knowledge, and our conceptual tools.
Accordingly, one theologian cannot dismiss another’s position as
“unchristian” simply by showing that it does not accept some ancient
dogma, especially some previous attempt to state quite precisely the
meaning of some fundamental Christian idea. For example, the idea that we
and the world in which we find ourselves owe our existence to God is one I
consider central to Christian faith; but I see no warrant for the
insistence that this idea must be expressed in terms of “creation out of
nothing,” especially if that means that there was a time when God existed
all alone, without any realm of finitude whatever.

(4) The idea that “faith” and “reason”
confront each other as two sets of possibly conflicting statements not
only reflects an unacceptable view of revelation; it also reflects a
misunderstanding of reason. There is no such thing as a world-view that is
based upon “pure reason,” unaffected by some “faith.” Every world-view is
based upon a pre-rational acceptance of some “insight” or “hunch” or
“clue” as to the nature of reality. Some dimension of experience or part
of reality is taken as the essential clue to the nature of the whole.
One’s reasoning is guided by this pre-rational acceptance of a
starting-point. Faith in the Christian revelation gives Christian
theologians a starting-point for their reasoning that is analogous to the
starting-points accepted on faith by theologians of other persuasions.
(These theologians are usually called “philosophers” when their acceptance
of some “faith” as a starting-point is not acknowledged.) The Christian
starting-point justifies itself rationally insofar as it provides the
basis for a more probable (i.e., more consistent, adequate, and
illuminating) account of this mysterious world in which we find ourselves
than those views which being with some other “revelation.”

(5) In the preceding sentence, one of the
criteria for a “more probable” account was that it had to be “more
adequate.” This means, “more adequate to the facts.” What are the
“facts” to which an account must be adequate? This is, of course, often
precisely the point at issue among various theological and philosophical
systems. One system is seeking to account for facts that the other system
dismisses as “myth” or “illusion.” Nevertheless considerable agreement is
possible; there are many things that are widely acknowledged to be
“facts,” or at least acknowledged to be so probable that any presently
accepted theory must incorporate them. The area that springs most quickly
to mind for most people today is probably the whole body of widely
accepted scientific facts (meaning primarily the natural sciences). I
would include, for example, the idea that more complex forms of life
evolved over a period of millions of years from less complex forms is one
of the scientific ideas that is so probable that it must be incorporated
into any acceptable theological doctrine of creation.

However, there is another type of “fact”
that should be even more regulative of our theological formulations: there
are a number of ideas that we all presuppose in practice whether or not we
espouse them verbally. Even if we verbally deny these ideas, our behavior
shows that we accept the. For example, some philosophers have denied that
we have any knowledge of causation in the sense that one event influences
another event. And yet all of us, including those same philosophers,
presuppose in every moment that we are influenced by other events
(otherwise we wouldn’t get angry at others for stabbing us) and that our
present actins will influence the future (otherwise we wouldn’t brush our
teeth). All those notions that are presupposed in practice by all people,
regardless of their cultural backgrounds, have been called “common
notions.” To deny one of them would be to be guilty of
self-contradiction, for one would be denying verbally what one is
otherwise presupposing in one’s living.

These common notions constitute the
most fundamental facts to which any philosophical or theological position
must be adequate. It is not an easy matter to formulate these common
notions precisely. In fact, the attempt to approximate them more and more
closely is the unending philosophical task. However, some of them can be
identified and expressed with enough adequacy to serve as criteria. Any
position that clearly denies one of these common notions is ipso facto
inadequate. One such common notion, I maintain, is that we are partially
free and hence partially responsible for our actions; another one is that
genuinely evil things happen in the world.

(6) One other central assumption behind
my theodicy involves the nature of “religion.” What does being
“religious” or having “faith” involve? Most centrally, it involves what
has variously been called “a vision of God,” “a sense of the sacred,” “a
taste of the holy,” etc. What is meant by the “holy” or the “sacred”
probably cannot be adequately defined, but certain pointers can be given.
The holy is that which evokes awe, worship, commitment. It is that which
has ultimate intrinsic value, and in relation to which other things have
their value. To sense something as being holy is to want to be in harmony
with it. This, in fact, is the basic religious drive of human beings––the
desire to be in harmony with the holy reality.

What attributes does a reality need to
have to be considered holy? Insofar as one is talking of things that have
been actually worshiped as holy, there has been great diversity. If we
limit attention to what has been explicitly conceived as worthy or
worship, then the number of characteristics is greatly reduced, and there
is some unanimity on certain characteristics. For example, the various
religions agree that the ultimately holy reality must be eternal, and must
exist necessarily. Also it must be the ultimately decisive power, at
least in regard to matters of ultimate concern. And there is considerable
consensus that the divine must be perfect, in the sense defined by Anselm:
that greater than which nothing can be thought. Only that which is perfect
an evoke our wholehearted worship and commitment.

But there are still important differences
among the various religious traditions. In particular, there are
differences in regard to which attributes are essential to perfection, and
hence which attributes must be possessed to a perfect degree. The
tradition in which we stand largely shapes our perception of what a
reality must be like in order to be considered holy, perfect, worthy of
worship and ultimate commitment. Those who have been decisively shaped by
the biblical tradition generally have felt that to be holy a reality had
to be morally perfect (as well as eternal, necessarily existing, and
perfect in power). In fact this perception has been so central that the
word “holy” has tended to lose much of its original meaning and to become
virtually synonymous with “morally good.” It is the idea that the holy
reality is morally perfect as well as perfect in power that creates the
problem of evil: if God is perfect in regard to both power and moral
intention, it seems that there should be no evil in the world. (My
solution to this problem involves arguing that “perfect power” need not be
equated with the traditional doctrine of omnipotence.)

(7) I said above that to sense something
as holy is to want to be in harmony with it. To make this statement
credible, a distinction implicit in it must be made explicit. This is the
distinction between a perception (what I have been calling a
vision, a taste, or a sense) of the holy, and the conception (or
belief) in something as holy. One may conceptually believe, for example,
that the God revealed through the biblical tradition is holy, and hence
believe that on we should live in harmony with this God’s will,
without really perceiving the world in these terms. One will
perceive something else to be holy, such as material things or “the bitch
goddess success,” and it is around this other thing that one’s life will
be decisively oriented. One’s conception of the holy will have
some affect upon one’s attitudes and emotions and hence upon one’s outer
behavior: for example, one may give some money to the church. But one’s
attitudes, emotions and behavior will be more decisively affected by one’s
perception of holiness. Insofar as one’s conception and perception
of holiness conflict, one will be psychically split, unable to act
spontaneously on one’s beliefs, and unable to support one’s spontaneous
impulses with conviction. It is the task of preachers, teachers,
counselors and finally the individuals themselves to bring their
perceptions of holiness into harmony with their beliefs. This
presupposes, of course, that the beliefs are worthy beliefs, ones
to which people’s perceptions of the world ought to be aligned. It
is the task of the Christian theologian to help people arrive at a set of
beliefs that are worthy and that can, at the same time and place, be
somewhat readily apprehended as convincing, so that the beliefs about the
Christian God can become a perception of this God as the
Holy Reality.

(8) One implication of this understanding
of the theological task is that a repetition of doctrines that performed
this task quite well in previous centuries may fail miserably today. What
I have in mind in particular is this: throughout most of Christian
history in Europe (roughly the 4th to the 18th centuries), the cultural
situation was such that the reality of God seemed overwhelmingly obvious
to most people. The understanding of the Bible, the ideas of the leading
thinkers, the works of the leading artists, and the authority of the
leading institutions all presupposed and reinforced the conceptual belief
and perceptual faith in the Christian God. In such a situation the
theologian could, when having trouble reconciling Christian doctrines with
each other, appeal to “mystery” without defaulting on the theological
task. Likewise, when Christian doctrines conflicted with the conclusions
of “reason,” the theologian could simply appeal to authority (including
the “authority” of reason which provided proofs for the existence of God),
which supported the Christian doctrines. In other words, the theologian
did not need to present a comprehensive view of the world that was
intrinsically convincing. The truth of the Christian position
(whatever it was) was widely held to be externally guaranteed
(through the authority of the Bible and/or the Church). In those
centuries the theological task could be primarily limited to the
refinement of belief and the essentially negative task of responding to
objections to this or that doctrine. The problem of evil in that
situation constituted no overwhelming problem threatening to undermine
faith itself. There was widespread confidence that there was a
solution, known to God, and there was no overriding need to be able to
discover that solution. Theologians often did devote many pages to it,
but when they encountered questions they could not answer, there was no
sense of desperation. They could calmly say that those remaining problems
were “mysteries” which we were not intended to understand.

But in our day, all of this has changed.
The results of the historical-critical approach to the Bible that has been
carried out in the past two centuries make it very difficult to consider
it (the Bible) an external guarantee for any particular doctrines. The
same is true for the Church. The “authority” of the Church and its
theologians is virtually non-existent. Furthermore, the leading thinkers
of the day, especially the philosophers, do not provide a cultural context
in which the reality of God is either assumed or commonly supported by
argumentation. In this situation the evils experienced in the
twentieth century constitute a much more serious problem for faith in God
than did the evils experience by people in earlier centuries (and this is
true even if one does not believe that the horrendous events of this
century exceed the evils of the previous centuries qualitatively or even
quantitatively).

I will now apply the above points to the
task of a theodicy for our times. A theodicy should be part of a total
theological position that is intended to be more consistent, adequate, and
illuminating of our experience than any of the alternative philosophical
and theological positions of the time. Such a theodicy cannot merely show
that the evils of the world do not necessarily contradict belief in God’s
perfect goodness and power. Nor can such a theodicy resort to encouraging
us to believe that there is a God of perfect goodness and power in spite
of the fact that the appearances suggest that some other hypothesis is
more probable. Rather, such a theodicy must attempt to portray the world
so that the hypothesis that the world has been created by such a God seems
more likely than other hypotheses, so that those who accept this belief
can come to perceive the world in these terms. In such a theodicy the
evils of the world should not be an embarrassment to the total theological
position; they should not be that ‘fact’ to which the theology somehow
manages to be ‘adequate’ but which would fit more comfortably within some
contrary hypothesis. Rather, the theodicy should ideally be more
illuminating of the nature of evil, and the reason for its existence, than
other portrayals of reality, including atheistic ones.

These are austere ideals for a theodicy,
and I do not pretend that mine achieves them. But they are the standards
by which I think a theodicy in our time should be measured. The
substantive differences between my theodicy and the others in this volume
probably all reflect differences in regard to these formal matters. This
does not necessarily mean that all debate should shift from substantive
doctrine to formal issues, for there is a dialectical relation between
substantive and formal issues. One’s substantive beliefs influence one’s
position on formal issues at least as much as the other way around.

What it does mean is that debates as to
the adequacy of various theodicies should not be carried on apart from
reflection on the over-all task of Christian theology in our time.

____________________

[1]
Rather than rejecting creatio ex nihilo, some theologians
(e.g., Nicholas Berdyaev) distinguish between two interpretations of
nihil: absolute nothingness (ouk on in Greek) and
relative nothingness (mē on). They then affirm the doctrine in
the second sense. That is a perfectly acceptable approach, and one
which I as a Whiteheadian can take, since a pure chaos would have no
order, and the first type of order is the ordering of momentary events
into series of “enduring objects,” such as electrons. Since when we
speak of a “thing” we normally have an enduring object in mind, there
would be no-thing in a state of pure chaos. However, the doctrine of
ex nihilo has usually been used to affirm creation out of
absolutely nothing, often with the specific intention of denying
creation out of chaos. It is in this sense that I employ the term in
this essay.

[2]
Even this expanded statement would not be adequate for all positions,
since some theologians do not consider God to be “a being.” But this
problem does not arise for the positions articulated in this book.

[3]
Defenders of the hybrid free-will defense have another major problem
which my more consistent affirmation of creaturely freedom avoids.
According to their position, since God freely created human freedom,
God could interrupt it at any time. Hence they must explain why God
does not interrupt it to prevent at least some of the more horrendous
moral evils that occur. This problem, along with that of accounting
for natural evil, tends to lead them finally to deny that any events
are genuinely evil.